Chemistry and Other Stories

A consummate writer, Rash's Appalachia assumes a reality few capture as brilliantly, whether in novels or short stories. Chemistry and Other Stories is a sampler of the characters who people Rash's novels, from the old and the new South, the intransigent past, the bloody fields of the Civil War never far from the intrusions of the present. As solid and unmoving as the landscape, those people possess a dignity and spirit unique to time and place, an unforgiving land where diligent souls coax forth meager crops, age sitting early on their faces. In the title story, "Chemistry", a boy learns that "sometimes you have to search for solutions in places where only the heart can go". Felled by a crushing depression, a man finds solace in a former hobby, scuba diving. And he returns to the Pentecostal religion of his youth. Watching his father cope with this unfamiliar burden, a son becomes intimate with understanding and compassion, then forgiveness as his father slips away in a watery grave. Hard work defines each day for a young couple who have purchased their own home in "Blackberries in June". Toiling long hours to improve the place, project by project, Jaimie and Matt are sanguine about the many years of hard work ahead, a future they both believe in. A family tragedy requires an adjustment of those hopes- "You got to accept life is full of disappointments"- but this couple is forged from stronger stuff than those who seek to exploit their progress. Loss is as familiar as tragedy as memories of the dead haunt the protagonist in "Cold Harbor". Anna, a nurse, clings to the small comfort: The fate of a man who survives his near-fatal wounds in Korea, the possibilities of his future a balm to her recurring nightmares. Seeking the truth of this survivor's post-war existence, Anna learns that "some grief is like barbed wire that's wound around a tree". In fact, this exquisite tension of pain and relief is a hallmark of Rash's writing, an appreciation of the uneasy balance of life's weights and measures. In "Dangerous Love", a young woman flirts with her attraction to a carnival knife thrower, the slippery fact of the couple's need to skirt the edge of danger defining the relationship. Escaping a predictable future, she leaves security behind, committed to a nightly testing of her lover's accuracy. Yet another kind of love is revealed in "Deep Gap". Uncomfortable in the drug-riddled world his son inhabits, Marshall Vaughn carries a gun when he confronts his boy and two others in a filthy apartment. After treatment, father and son hope for the best. But old habits eventually reassert themselves when there is little hope and scarce motivation. Unable to help his boy, Vaughn lays his own life on the line in a gesture of unconditional love. Whatever the time frame, scene or characters, Rash's Appalachia is a repository of wisdom, grace, stubbornness and survival, sometimes a bleak, unforgiving landscape, just as often the source of hope. This is no place f

In "Chemistry and Other Stories," Ron Rash's most recent collection of short stories from Picador, Rash does exactly what Aristotle suggested to young writers over 2000 years ago; he starts his stories "in medias res"--"In the middle of things." Aristotle knew that if a story was to be successful, it had to focus on the main conflict immediately. Rash executes Aristotle's idea flawlessly in this fine collection. "The spring my father spent three weeks at Broughton Hospital, he came back to my mother and me pale and disoriented, two pill bottles clutched in his right hand as we made our awkward reunion in the hospital lobby." So begins the title story of Rash's collection, "Chemistry." Rash drops the reader in the middle of things by cutting to the heart of the conflict in the first sentence. He follows "Chemistry" with "Last Rite." "When the sheriff stepped onto her porch, he carried his hat in his hands, so she knew Elijah was dead." Lately, it seems, I have been lulled to sleep by recent fiction entries in some of the finest literary journals around, seasoned writers trying to entice me into their fictional web with weak beginnings dealing with nothing more challenging than weather reports, bird nests, and hammered metal bells. Rash, unlike many of his contemporaries, understands the structure of effective storytelling and how to imbue a tale with urgency. He starts so perfectly, it's hard to imagine the story could have begun anywhere else. Once the story's in full swing, Rash sketches in supporting events and background with the grace of a magician, so invisibly the reader will scarcely be aware he's doing it. "I met Lee Ann McIntyre on a date suggested by my wife." From Rash's story, "Honesty." How can bird nests and metal bells possibly compete with that lead-in? Or the first sentence of, "Dangerous Love."--"When Ricky threw his knife and the blade tore my blouse and cut into flesh eight inches from my heart, it was certain as the blood trickling down my arm that something in our relationship had gone wrong." This is powerful writing and exquisite storytelling. Let's not forget, Rash is a poet. He knows about economy of language and writes like he's paying for each and every word out of his own pocket. John Gardner, author of "October Light, Mickelsson's Ghost," and many other titles, once remarked that every line of poetry should be "red meat." Rash obviously knows to stick to the main course, using words impeccably, and sparingly. "When Pemberton returned to the North Carolina mountains after four months in Boston settling his father's estate, among those waiting on the train platform was a woman pregnant with Pemberton's child." From "Pemberton's Bride." Rash's beginning sentences sweep the reader in like a riptide, and make compelling promises to his audience, which he delivers upon each and every time. These aren't tricks, or slight of pen; this is solid storytelling at its best. "After the second time his hardware store had b

Rash's Chemistry is that rare collection of short stories that I'll reread--again and again, like Hannah's Airships and Carver's What we Talk About when we Talk about Love. As a resident of Western North Carolina, I have an affinity for stories that explore and examine the peoples and places of the region. But even if you care little about this area, you should read this collection. The language and characters are remarkable in strength and diversity--lovely and evocative. I immediately bought Rash's novel, The World Made Straight, upon finishing Chemistry, and I'm now deep into that world. Thank you, Mr. Rash!

It is impossible to read Chemistry and Other Stories, as I just did, without the floor slanting a little. At our house in riverside Ohio (sixty year old wood floors in most rooms; some carpet; a little bit of concrete in the room where we keep the upright piano), we've noticed an eight or nine degree tilt. At my in-laws' place, in Rowan County, Kentucky, only three degrees, but that's an old farmhouse my father-in-law built with his own hands, and it was already tilted a little. I don't want to give too much away, not that it would ruin it for you, because it won't, but it might redact a tiny bit of the pleasure these stories have stored away for you, and why do that? Let me say, though, that "Pemberton's Bride," the second to last story, might be the only new story I've read this year that I kept living inside long after I turned the final page. It has all the perl and sweep of an epic novel packed into fewer pages than a New Yorker magazine article, and all this without skimping on scene-making or resorting to some kind of false summary resolution. Worth noting, too, is the story "Speckled Trout," basis for Rash's novel The World Made Straight, set to a tune called down from eight clouds north. There aren't many writers working who can spin a yarn or write a sentence worthy of the ones in this book. I'll here invoke Alice Munro's "A Wilderness Station," Denis Johnson's story "Train Dreams," and Jim Harrison's "Legends of the Fall," not because the comparisons are just right, but because we'd be in adjacent neighborhoods, emotionally speaking, and because I think it might convince a few good readers to buy this book and be transported the way I just was. These stories are in my dreams, and it will be difficult, now, to separate the life I've lived in flesh and blood from the life I've just lived in ragged-bound trade paperback. That's not something you get to say too often after you read a regular old book.